The current climate crisis has ecological, technological, historical, and conceptual roots in the Cold War, and Daw's illuminating, insightful study Writing Nature in Cold War American Literature reveals those roots while also underscoring crucial differences between the Cold War and the contemporary – differences that often impede measurable progress on the threat of global climate change. Daw claims that the volume is “the first book-length ecocritical study of Cold War literature” (20). Identifying a gap in scholarship on the representation and function of nature in Cold War texts, she gathers a group of prominent mid-century writers and unearths the influences upon their understanding of the ecological and their responses to the new nuclear world order. Moving away from what she calls the “privileging of texts from the British Romantic and American Transcendentalist traditions” (213 n. 22) in contemporary eco-criticism, Daw focusses on a pertinent and sometimes surprising selection of Cold War writers: Paul Bowles, Peggy Pond Church, J. Robert Oppenheimer, J. D. Salinger, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Mary McCarthy.

Building on the work of Stacy Alaimo, Daniel Cordle, Daniel Grausam, Ramachandra Guha, and especially Timothy Morton, Daw locates a “pronounced turn towards a diverse range of non-Euro-American philosophies in the work of a number of white American writers between the mid-1940s and early 1970s” (7). This interest in “Eastern” philosophies, Daw argues (keeping the term carefully circumscribed by scare quotes indicating the appropriative and sometimes orientalist understanding of these philosophies by such writers), had a pronounced effect on the representation of nature in the nuclear age. Nature, in Daw's interpretation of these writers, becomes “an infinite ecological system” (15) that reconfigures the trope of human annihilation as a positive circumvention of the age's obsession with nuclear holocaust. Rather than reinforcing a view of nature as a fragile target for nuclear bombs, these writers imagine it as what later materialist theorists such as Jane Bennett and Karen Barad would call “agential” forces. For Daw, the spectre of nuclear obliteration is countered in these writers by new representations of ecology in which the natural world becomes a matrix so all-encompassing that it subsumes both the human and the nuclear. For instance, in her first chapter, on the work of expatriate Paul Bowles, Daw draws on Alaimo's notion of the trans-corporeal to argue that Bowles depicts a “common materiality” (27) between human and environment. In a series of lucid close readings, Daw demonstrates how Bowles's characters seek less absolution for their American imperial guilt in the African deserts than complete annihilation – a desired rather than feared destruction of the individual ego – that asserts the agential power of the environment and subverts the dominant Cold War discourse trumpeting the conquest and mastery of Nature.

Her second chapter, a highly original pairing of the relatively obscure New Mexico poet Peggy Pond Church with the famous physicist and Manhattan Project leader J. Robert Oppenheimer, argues that, together, their work “attempts a broader recalibration of the relationship between mid-century American society and Nature” (61). Through readings of Church's poetry and Oppenheimer's essays (as well as his famous invocations of the Bhagavadgita), Daw locates a widening ecological vision in which “a symbiotic relationship with a temporally infinite, ecological Nature constitutes an infinitely superior form of knowledge when compared to nuclear science” (88). Daw's work in this chapter is particularly good: she maintains a careful distinction between Church and the poet's persona, and she notes that Oppenheimer was the only one of her chosen writers to read non-Euro-American thought in its original language – both of which ensure this chapter's sophisticated recovery of crucial and (in the case of Oppenheimer) unexpectedly ecological voices.

Chapters on J. D. Salinger and on Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, while perhaps not as original, nevertheless capably explore how those writers turned to Daoist and Zen Buddhist texts to recalibrate the notion of ego dissolution into one in which humans and environment are complexly entangled. Daw also notes the orientalist and sexist overtones of Salinger's writing and that of the beats, tracing it to their (mis)reading of “Eastern” thought and balancing the new ecological vision they articulate with some of the old biases to which they subscribe. A final chapter on Mary McCarthy, focussed mostly on her novel Birds of America (1971), follows this new ecological vision into the 1970s, tracing both its lament at “the failure of mid-twentieth-century American citizens to engage with Nature” (192) and how it “damagingly conflates Native American culture and biocentrism” (186).

Daw's study might benefit from examinations of prominent Cold War poets such as Charles Olson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell, all of whom deal with the nuclear and (especially in Bishop's case) the ecological. And while Daw's capitalization of the word “Nature,” following Morton, usually constitutes a helpful reminder of the constructed and reifying qualities of the category – the problematics of the term and its history – she occasionally deploys it while arguing that a writer is making the opposite point: that nature is a complex, counterintuitive, broadly expansive category of mutually entangled existence. Minor quibbles aside, Daw's study is an excellent and quite original contribution to American literary studies and to eco-criticism, one that also lends more urgency still to the problem of climate change.